Attack on Titan 1 & 2 (live action)

(Reviewed on 12/09/2015)

The Titanic ROSSMAN

I'm going to do something a little different with this here review. The two Attack on Titan live action movies were so incredibly, heinously, atrociously bad, that they had absolutely ZERO redeeming features, and every last thing I can say about them is just terrible and mean. They're both awfu. Don't watch them. Go and watch the incredible Attack on Titan anime series instead.

That having been said, I'm just going to freestyle my thoughts on these flicks as I watched them. If you want to know what they're about, here's a quick synopsis: 100 years ago, a butt-load of 50-foot tall giants who look like special needs people appeared on Earth and began eating all the humans that they could. These mongo-giants (aka, Titans) couldn't be killed, so the last remnants of humanity built three giant rings of walls (one within another, within another) in order to keep these Titans out... Don't ask how they constructed these giant barricades with all those giants destroying everything and eating everyone, they just did, and they worked.

But today, a plucky angry teenage hero, and his two friends, witness a never-before seen GIANT Titan, who is even taller than the outermost wall, appears, and kicks a hole in the wall for hordes of the retarded-looking regular Titans to flood in, and eat as many people as they want.

Two years then pass, and our hero, Eren, has joined the military in order to fight back, learn how to master the grappling hook leg-mounts that the soldiers use to fight the giant threat, close the hole in the wall, and kill all the Titans who made it into the outermost ring. Their mission goes to shit, and it turns out that Eren can somehow turn into a Titan himself, but he's not a bad Titan... He's a good Titan. Lots of gore and blood then ensues. Shitty ending.

Now, to show you my rambling notes that I took whilst watching these two movies unfurl.

Attack on Titan movie 1

Things start off with lead character Eren, Eren's girl Mikasa, and their wussy friend Armin, tooling around the outer-most ring of their walled-in world... Only instead of the kind of tough, smart, and resourceful characters from the manga and anime, they're all wussy kids here. And they're all so very Japanese. See, unlike the manga and anime, where things take place in middle Europe, with only one Asian character, the girl, the movie takes place in Japan. I understand that it's a Japanese production, but by taking it away from its original settings, it totally kills the amazing vibe and feel that the series had going for it.

Anyways, all our terrible trio does is whine and pout over how life is boring, or how their friend, Eren, can't keep a job. Mikasa is the complete opposite of her badass self from the manga in this movie too — she's a shy, bubbly, giggly girl here. It's a crime.

Corny, painful piano background music sets the awful tone of the flick. And then when the warbly full orchestra kicks in, it just sounds like some random shitty middle school orchestra warming up.

It's only a hundred years since the Titans began attacking, and since humans hastily built the walls to keep them out of their possibly last remaining city, but the teenagers in this thing have never even heard of "the ocean," and find its existence unpossible? Was that in the manga? Even if it was, here, in this live action universe, these lines, and hell, the Titans and all the preposterous things just sound and look ridiculous. Honestly, some things should never be made with real people. There's a reason animation exists.

Eren and his pussy posse then try to sneak past the wall guards and climb up the giant barrier in order to see if the ocean is on the other side (What?). They immediately get caught by an old soldier who once wanted to bang Eren's mom, and as he's lecturing them on their stupidity and bad acting, a gigantic Titan, larger than even the 50-meter tall wall to the outside world, appears RIGHT OUTSIDE THE PLACE where they're standing, despite there not being any doorway or any weakened part of the concrete fence to kick in. This King Titan eventually kicks the wall in. And man does this giant motherfucker look absolutely hilariously cheezy in the cheap-o CGI he's rendered in.

Then, when the regular Titans appear and start marching through the hole in the wall, they're real people in costumes, and although they look better than the CGI giant Titan, and although the regular 15 to 50-foot Titans look relatively close to their drawn counterparts, they simply appear laughable in live action form, as opposed to seriously creepy and hideous in the manga and anime.

Just like the anime, it's incredibly violent, but unlike the anime, the live action people spill about 10 gallons of blood and guts each whenever they're ripped apart or stepped on by a Titan.

There's a scene (right after we witness the Titans' insatiable hunger for human flesh causing them to utterly destroy Eren's hometown in the outer ring) that had me laughing harder than the funniest Bugs Bunny cartoon I can ever remember seeing (the one with Bugs and Elmer in the Opera, "What's Opera, Doc")... Eren just saw his girlfriend Mikasa die, and then he just stands there and gapes (like a puppy who just had his chew toy torn from his grasp) as a building FULL of people gets turned into red Kool Aid that splashes all over him. After which, our plucky and pathetic protagonist wanders away from the destruction and death and body parts in stunned silence... Except it looks like he's a 3-year old being sent to bed before his favorite TV show is on (head lowered, jerky walk, and shuffling his feet like the pathetic choad that he is), and every time a foot fall lands, a comical "squishy" noise sounds, almost like he was making a farty sound with his fist in a can of green slime. And this scene goes on for waaaaaaay too long. It's like a full minute of him walking away like he's about to cry, "Bu' I don' WANNA go beddy bye! I wanna watch my Crayon Shin-chaaaaaaan!"

Eren and his remaining wussy friend then join the military. We skip past any training or military life (not even in the form of a montage), but we're expected to have sympathy and care about all of the troops and their foibles... I cared not one shit. In fact, I found I couldn't wait to start seeing them get turned into Titan appetizers.

As the army squad is sneaking (very poorly, in large, loud troop transports) to the outer wall to plug it, Eren and his new buddies stupidly wake up all the Titans because they can't follow the simplest of orders. Then the most goddamn hilarious thing ever happens: The fat jovial soldier grabs the arm of a 50-foot Titan that reaches for him, and fat guy fucking Judo-tosses the enormous humanoid being. Oh god! You'll have to rewind that scene and watch it at least 3 or 4 times before you can continue.

Then, halfway through the first movie, Mikasa reappears as a super-soldier who's apparently been on the front line of the Titan battle for the past 2 years without telling Eren. It's good to see her acting like the badass that she was in the anime, but seriously, why make her a total wuss like she was in the beginning of this thing in the first place?

And how in the hell did Mikasa not die? Eren was watching her from the window of the house he was trapped in! How did he mistake her dying two years ago? He had a perfect view of her fate! And if she wasn't dead, and secretly training to become the top gun Omni-Directional Mobility Gear (ODMG) user in the whole wide world, why wasn't she allowed to tell Eren this? Once again, they're all in the same fucking army, and it's not like if this intel got out to the enemy it could cause ANY harm whatsoever. It's just so goddamn retarded.

Oh, and what review of this movie would be complete without mention of just how absolutely SHITTY the ODMG effects are. The physics of how an actual human body would move if such a device was possible are not at all what we see on film. Instead of something even slightly realistic, we get choppy physics straight out of a 1997 PS1 video game. I don't know how else to describe it. There's no grace or fluidity to the way people fly around on the leg-holstered grappling hooks; they choppily shoot up, and then with the suddenness of a heart attack they sharply change direction, but their bodies don't look like they just took a quick turn while going 80MPH, they just turn and continue on.

Soon we're back in the abandoned town that Eren and his pussy friend fled away from in the first act, only now, for some reason, there's none of the one or two-story tall wooden structures that were all that we saw before (making the burg look like a cheap shanty town). Now it looks like an abandoned Eastern European city left to crumble. Everything is 3-8 stories of concrete cookie-cutter buildings straight out of a Chernobyl nightmare. This thing can't even keep its sets and iconography straight!

Then Eren gets a chance to confront Mikasa about why she's not dead and all, and she just tells him that she "was eaten" by the Titan who was bearing down on her last we saw, and that's that. Don't ask any more silly questions. Then a tough douchie soldier interrupts the two, and hugs Mikasa while FORCING her to eat his apple. I'm not just throwing random strings of words together, this shit happened. And after it happened, Eren walks outside of the abandoned apartment building they were in, puts his hands to his ears, and then bellows in agony or comedy (depending on the mood you're in, I suppose) for about a full goddamn 30 seconds, making a sound that can only be described as Rosco P. Coltrane "Goo goo gooo"-ing over the Duke boys running over his dog Flash.

Then Eren and his new girlfriend (who's not Mikasa, but who did almost get the squad killed the night before by looking for and then annoying a CGI Titan baby) watch a couple of soldiers have sex, and then Eren freaks the fuck out when this girl makes him grope her titty. Seriously, Eren reacts like Rain Man being told that he'd have to miss People's Court. He tries to back away from this cute girl who's totally putting out (on the night before they are more than likely going to die trying to plug the gap in the wall) just like Dustin Hoffman going into one of his bug-eyed autistic frenzies yelling, "No! Noooo! NO! Wapner at 5. Definitely. Definitely Wapner at 5... Hanes on the highway! NooooOOOOOoooo!" The acting is top notch... At least it would have been had Eren actually been an autistic character. Then, before he can get to the good stuff, a Titan appears and eats the only chick who ever put out for Eren. Honestly though, he deserved it.

Then a huge battle occurs, with everybody getting off witty banter (like "Stay still, Titan, at least die with dignity," said smirkily) in the middle of being jerked here and there by their ODMG. And somehow, these super-soldiers can hit the nape of the attacking Titans' necks (their only weak spot) from the side, 50 feet away. I replayed several of the Titan-take-downs to see if I was witnessing things correctly. And yes, the elite ODMG troops were slashing their blades yards away from their targets, and yet the Titans' super-thick skin on the back of their necks would blow up in a bloody geyser of bodily fluids despite them being so far away, and attacking from the front or the side. So shoddy...

All the "terror" and "tension" that is supposedly building up in this battle is constantly dispersed due to the horrible overacting taking place, and women fretting that their boyfriends won't wake up when said BFs are missing their lower bodies entirely. It's just too goddamn funny to be taken seriously.

I just laughed out loud and woke the dog, who then started running around the house looking for what was wrong, or food, or something... So Eren finally grew some balls and started attacking the Titans who were obliterating his team, and he's being coached by the Apple Captain (who forcefed Mikasa his fruit a scene or two earlier) who's standing on a rooftop about a half a mile away, grinning like an idiot. Eren hears every word this man says amidst the fires, explosions, Titans making their retard sounds, people screaming in agony, and the wind whipping past his ears as he shoots across the sky with his ODMG. But the funniest part is when a Titan bites his leg off and then throws Eren, the boy goes flying for at least 4 city blocks, and lands otherwise unhurt on a rooftop. Physics and human biology? What're those?

Oh my god... The music, it's just too much. I wouldn't even call it "music" really, it's just a loud din. Everything sounds off-key and just plain awful. I'd rather listen to a 2 year-old bang on pots and pans and his toy xylophone for a few hours.

Eren's wussy friend is then picked up by a Titan, and despite every other Titan eating their human prey within seconds of getting their hands on them, this one takes 3 entire minutes (I timed it) to even move his fist holding the poor schlub up to his mouth. This gives the human soldiers around them plenty of time to shoot ineffective arrows into the Titan's forearm (this attack and waste of 8 or so arrows made no sense to me at all), and also lamely swing an ax at the monster's feet, causing tiny cuts that healed up instantly. This was all a lead up for legless Eren to sloooooowly crawl across the building rooftop to the Titan holding his friend, in order to get eaten himself. Seriously, Japan, it's called "editing." It's used to make things more dramatic and better paced. I hear they teach it in film school.

The remaining ODMG troops then gather on top of a very low building to discuss their options, and how their officers abandoned them... While they're getting picked-off one by one by the encircling Titans... Why not take refuge on top of one of the many TALLER buildings all around that the Titans can't reach? Or go down into a basement?

Then Eren's Titan form appears (yes, somehow Eren became a Titan, don't think about it, Morty)... Did they run out of money for practical makeup at this point? It looks like he's wearing a mask and cheap-o body suit that was rejected by the Power Rangers producers. Then a Titan battle royale takes place that makes the 90s Toho Godzilla movies look like Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach scene. It's craptastic in its cheesiness.

Oh! That really happened! Eren's Titan splattered two evil Titans' heads into the ground, and that threw CGI blood on the camera lens. Fucking hilarious.

Then Eren's Titan collapses from fatigue, and the only old guy left with the platoon knows (he just KNOWS, man!) that if they slice open the beast's neck that they'll find human-sized Eren there, totally whole and healed. But strangely enough, he was in a gelatinous membrane cocoon that resembled the way the Uruk-Hai came out of the ground in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Then, finally, after what felt like a month, but was only 90 minutes, movie one was over... Except for the shitty hip-hop song that unfortunately played over the credits.

Movie 2: End of the World

Then I jumped straight into the second movie, which started with a full five minute recap of the first movie. It turns out that that 5 minutes is all you really need, seeing as it gave us all the pertinent info about what has already happened that we needed, and it was infinitely less painful than having sat through the full length of the real thing.

Things then officially start with a flashback of Eren's boring, monotone, poorly acting, scientist father injecting a much younger Eren with some sort of liquid, just before the Japanese Gestapo kick in the family's front door like a bunch of bullying pricks. They're acting all mafia-like, saying shit like, "It'd be a real shame if something bad were to happen to all your research books and such here, doctor..." Then they knock shit to the ground, punch both the man and his wife in their guts, then they callously burn the place to cinders, with the old drunk soldier from the first movie getting Eren off to safety. It's played so hackneyed that it's a pain to sit through this scene. It's not even anything so bad that it makes it fun to laugh at. It's just BAD bad. Not a good start for this movie, and I am now very nervous that it'll be even more agonizing than than part 1.

We then find Eren in the present, chained and gagged, with soldiers pointing their guns at him, and the general in charge of the failed assault to block up the hole in the wall lecturing the poor guy for turning into a Titan himself. Eren's wussy friend comes to his aid by pointing out that they'd all be dead if it weren't for Titan Eren, but the old douchebag McDoucherton just mumbles that maybe Titan Eren punching the heads off of, and biting the necks off of all those Titans was just a coinkydink. That he didn't mean to help the humans. Then the glasses-wearing girl has an orgasm in front of everybody over how awesome Eren's powers seem to be. You think I'm kidding....

Holy fucking shit, that's hilarious! Just as drunk soldier who had a crush on Eren's mom steps forward to tell everybody that Eren is just a normal human who got experimented on by his own father, somebody shoots him in the heart! It was played up to be so tense, and so electrifyingly dramatic, but ended up looking like an overacted death scene in a grade school play. Especially how his single bullet wound kept smoking for a full minute after he hit the ground.

Just as the dickbag general orders his SS troops to open fire on Eren, the ceiling caves in right on top of him and the armored Titan appears... looking nothing at all like his anime counterpart, but even more like Rita Repulsa's monster of the week... Only cheaper.

Armored-chan then fly-swats or steps on half of the remaining troops, but leaves with Eren in his grasp after Mikasa has the saddest stare-down competition with him in the history of forever.

The few soldiers still alive then decide to find a giant bomb that Eren and Mikasa were playing on at the beginning of the first movie, before everything went to shit, and use that to collapse the hole in the wall, since some masked guy who looked like Scarecrow in Batman Begins blew up all their ordinance that they brought with them at the end of part 1.

Apparently now that Mikasa is a hardened hard-ass, she no longer acts like a dumb schoolgirl anymore. Now she acts all pensive and tough by solely looking at the ground with a blank expression on her face. 20 minutes into this thing and that is all she can do apparently. Well, that and talk like a monotone robot.

Eren wakes up in a brightly-lit, white room with a jukebox playing some 1950s song that keeps repeating "The end of the world" in English, just in case you forgot the title of the movie. After the song ends, Captain Apple (the guy who sexily made Mikasa eat the apple in movie 1) shows up and straight up tells Eren that the Japanese military made the mongoloid Titans in an experiment to remake Captain America or something. They attempted this by tying some ugly guy up in the desert, putting a colander on his head, and nuking him till he explodes. Then, TA-DA! He's instantly a human-eating Titan.

Apparently after this experiment, the Titan "virus" was in the atmosphere, and people would just come down with it like the flu. But instead of puking and getting a fever, they almost instantaneously turned into grotesquely hilarious giants with no genitals. That's it. That's the huge mystery involving the Titans. Nothing more to see here. Move along... Move along...

And it turns out that erotic apple guy is starting a rebellion and has a bunch of elite soldiers on his side, each armed with a shit-ton of human-killing guns and rocket launchers... So, when somebody acts like a total douchebag from the first time they're introduced in your shows and movies, Japan, that means they're 100% a total asshat, huh? No red herrings, no twists? That's it? He's a dick?

Somehow Mikasa and the wussy friend got that gigantic, super weighty, 40-foot long bomb up on their troop transport without any heavy-lifting machines. Impressive! They could probably build Stonehenge in a day with their bare hands! Or the Pyramids of Giza in a week!

So we've been told that the Titans are attracted to the sounds of human voices, but apparently the soldiers can roll around heavily-populated Titan spaces in giant, thundering, diesel-chugging transport trucks and the Titans won't bat an eye at them?

Oh, wait, so when Apple Captain tells Mikasa, Eren, and the rest of the loyal soldiers that he's going to commandeer their bomb and use it to blow a hole in the second wall (where the rest of the population is hiding behind) instead of closing up the gap in the outer barricade, we were supposed to be as surprised about this "revelation" as Eren is? I thought that it was obvious from the start that he was a traitor. Is Eren really that slow? If I didn't say so before, I'm saying it now: the writing here is pure and total CRAP.

After learning of Apple Captain's betrayal, Eren spends a full minute seething with what looks like constipation all the while flashing back to things we just saw in the first movie or that just happened 20 minutes before in this flick. He then falls to his knees and wails to the heavens like a 5 year old who was told he was "out" in a game of tag when the tagger wasn't anywhere near him. Then he tries to fight the traitor and gets his ass HANDED to him by Apple Officer, and it made me cheer. Though the fisticuffs went on nearly as long as the extended fight over the sunglasses in They Live. Editing, people, editing...

Then Apple Guy and Eren change into their mall-bought Halloween costumes and fight like they were in a Godzilla movie for a while. Well, a Godzilla movie directed by the guy who shoots the shaky-cam footage of all the Jason Bourne brawls.

Oh, and one of Eren's kicks is caught by Apple Titan in the same way that one of his earlier kicks was caught by the soldier he had a beef with in the first movie. Back then, Eren performed a move where he shoved his free knee in the guy's face... In case you can't see where I'm going with this, or in case you forgot it, they replay that earlier scene in its entirety in order to remind you that Eren can do it. Then he does it. It is the opposite of fulfilling.

What. The. Fuckity. Fuck... The old asshole general who had the ceiling fall on his head earlier just came back and turned into the Giant King Titan. Before that though, he orders the good guy troops to NOT use the bomb to seal up the hole... WHY?! Why does he care?! He could easily kick another hole, or 50 holes in the outer wall if he wanted? Why not LET them waste the bomb!

Oh, and for some reason, General Douche turned into King Titan on the OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL from Eren and his quickly depleting friends. And then he found that instead of being able to attack our heroes straight on — because he was on the other side of the enormous barricade — he had to reach over the wall and swat at them, and the bomb, from the outside. I hope the writer and director are ashamed of themselves.

After an extremely prolonged and boring fight, the Giant King Titan is about to win and smash Eren in his palm, when all of a sudden Apple Titan comes from out of fucking nowhere, picks up the bomb, and shoves the whole thing in King Titan's screaming mouth... For no reason at fucking all. He does shout out "I do this for you, Eren," but up till this exact moment he's done nothing but despise and beat the shit out of Eren. Whatever.

The bomb blows off King Titan's head.... And THEN King Titan screams out in agony. This is the worst thing ever.

Then, for NO REASON AT ALL (again), the wall above the hole explodes in a fireball and fills in the gap. I have no idea what the hell is going on anymore.

Then Eren and Mikasa sit on top of the wall and look out upon the ocean, which is RIGHT THERE of course. The wall is practically IN the sea.... Which begs the questions, why did King Titan kick in a hole on THAT SIDE of the wall? Wouldn't he have gotten a bunch more Titans to show up and enter the human safety zone if he did it on a side facing open land?

They never even try to explain how these people (Eren, Apple Captain, and General Douche) can become Titans temporarily, and still retain their senses. "Magic serum" seems to be the only answer given.

And that's the end. Triumphant music then blares, despite the fact that there are only like 5 army guys left who can use those ODMG rigs, and there are still several dozen Titans roaming around the outer ring, and they don't know if there are any other assholes who can transform into Titans and who want to destroy, or become the masters of, the remnants of civilization.

Wait, hold on a second... Why did the general who turned into King Titan try to kill Eren in the first place if he and Apple Captain were on the same team? Those two bad guys were all chummy and in on everything together? So why did Apple Guy rescue Eren then? My head hurts.

Other Stuff

The differences between the manga/anime series and these movies are so great, that the theatrical stories only have a general outline that vaguely matches the most basic background of the original work. Other than "There are giants that look like Downs Syndrome adults who go around eating people, and normal-sized humans built three giant rings around their last safe city to keep the enormous waterheads out," these flicks have jack and shit to do with their source material.

The characters rarely match the personalities and actions of their manga/anime counterparts. There is no small walled-in gated city on the inside of the main gate that leads to the outside of the outer barricade (once the Titans enter the wall in the movies they're inside the whole open area of the outer ring). The Omni-Directional Gear (the equipment that allows soldiers to fly around on propelled ropes with grappling hooks on the ends) only becomes available two years after the outer wall breach by the giant Titan, and it's a brand new technology to the soldiers... Which doesn't explain how they can use them like Spider-Man the first time they utilize them, but whatever. The raid to take back the outer ring starts off as a really boring nighttime cross-country armor-transport drive, instead of a fast, furious, heroic attack using the rocket grappling hooks. The army officers in the live action movie dress up like Nazi SS officers for some reason... And, well, fuck. I could go on and on and on about the big and small differences between the source material and these movies. And fuck it. I've already wasted too much time on this thing.

What did I think of the two Attack on Titan live action movies? They were the worst, the most vile, the most horrendous things I've forced myself to sit through in a long, long time. There were absolutely NO redeeming qualities to them at all. The actors sucked, the script appeared to have been written by a 3 year-old with crayons and poop, the special effects were awful, the music sounded like a cat dying while it was scratching up a chalk board, and I wanted to punch the film editor in the face.

Skip these things. Re-watch the vastly superior anime series, or reread the manga. Stay the fuck away from these theatrical motion pictures. I give these two movies two Titanous THUMBS DOWN, and I shit upon their memory.

TAMMI WITH AN "i"

Ah have no opinion about this here Attack on the Titans movie. The Rossman wouldn't even let any of us watch it with him. He knew it was gonna be bad... He just knew. The fact that he wouldn't even allow Jimmy Jammer or Angry Amy sit in on it with him shows you that he is a real compassionate person... He's a masochist, not a sadist.

Anyway, Ah could hear him screamin' things at the TV screen in his own house from 2 blocks away, where Ah was helpin' mah Gran-Gran make her winter's supply of moon-shine in her tub. Ah could hear him a'yellin', "NOOOO! Why would a Titan even DO that!?" and, "Arrrrgh, that is the stupidest plot point since Ape-raham Lincoln in Burton's Planet of the Apes!" The whole neighborhood just sat around in terrified silence that day, listening to his mad rants.

No thanks. Ah will accept the Rossman's sacrifice of watchin' this movie without forcin' anybody else to suffer through it. He may be a bit more brain retarded because of it, but his sufferin' will not be in vain.

BUDDY CHRIST

I Oh man, I am so sorry for letting this movie series get made. See, it was originally just a pet project I was working on to see if I could make anything worse than the Star Wars Holiday Special in order to help my pal Satan make her charges in Hell watch something terrible for all eternity. It was not meant for healthy, normal souls. In fact, I think it causes lasting damage in the brains of the non-evil.

Unfortunately, these kinds of mistakes happen all too frequently. Sometimes Satan creates a book, movie, or TV series to torture the souls under her jurisdiction, and it finds its way topside. That's when you get stuff like Twilight, or Baccano. *Shiver* Oooooo..... Those are bad enough, but I put everything I could into these Titan films to try and out do her. I even took from a great source material and proceeded to make it so terrible that it put a test monkey in the hospital for a week! And yes, we use animal testing in Heaven. Would you rather we use children who eat hamburgers like PETA petitioned us to do? Then zip it!

I apologize whole heartedly that this work of mass destruction made it Earth-side. I hope it'll never happen again.